Medieval people had such a different mindset from us that understanding their thoughts and perspectives can feel like trying to hold a conversation with someone who’s standing across a river bank. The illuminated manuscript shown here shows a bald man separated by a wide stream from a young person in white. It is the only picture to accompany the late 14th-century Middle English poem called “The Pearl,” and we can well imagine his frustration with the distance between himself and the figure. In the poem, we learn that he was dreaming, and the young woman was probably his deceased daughter, and he was grieving her loss but couldn’t reach her. We can have a strong sympathetic connection for a father mourning and missing his child, but in other ways, the poem and the Medieval mindset diverges from our own. The narrator’s “Pearl” spends most of the text teaching him about abstract Christian doctrine, her emotional distance from him emphasized by the river he cannot cross and her Stoic demeanor.
